The book chronicled Cunningham’s work through words, photographs, designs for sets and costumes, musical scores and choreographic notes. The app, which makes the text available digitally for the first time, is also updated to include the final years of Cunningham’s life and features new multimedia content like video excerpts and interviews.

Throughout his life Merce Cunningham came up with new ways to blend art and technology. He changed the way we think about space and time onstage, he explored dance on film before just about anyone else, and long before James Cameron and Hollywood made motion-capture cool, he was using three-dimensional computer animation to choreograph. Now, three years after his death in 2009, Cunningham is again at the vanguard. On Friday the Aperture Foundation is to introduce its first interactive application for the iPad, “Merce Cunningham: 65 Years.”

Cunningham’s own experience with technology was a driving force behind the app’s development and is chronicled in it. In 1989, As part of his choreographic process, Cunningham began to use a computer program designed specifically for him called LifeForms. His 1991 piece “Trackers” (a title inspired by the “tracking” function on the computer) was his first work made using the technology.

About the apps' release, Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen said, “Merce Cunningham’s career cannot be captured by words alone, no matter how eloquent. Knight Foundation was delighted to have the opportunity to support a multimedia publication that will allow so many more people to engage with his work.”

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